


Time Again

by spunknbite



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Compliant, Infinity Stone Fuckery, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Multiverse, Period-Typical Homophobia, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-03
Updated: 2018-05-03
Packaged: 2019-05-01 11:12:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14519268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spunknbite/pseuds/spunknbite
Summary: “His legs give out beneath him. Except he has no legs. He never feels the impact of the Wakandan soil. There’s nothing.”Or, Bucky wakes up after the battle of Wakanda in a time and place he doesn’t belong. And then wakes up again somewhere and sometime else. And again. And again. And again…Heed the tags. More will be added as appropriate.





	Time Again

“Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.”  
― Milan Kundera, _The_ _Unbearable_ _Lightness of Being_

 

“Steve - ” 

His legs give out beneath him. Except he has no legs. He never feels the impact of the Wakandan soil. There’s nothing.

*

*

*

He’s in Brooklyn. The threadbare curtains give it away - a repurposed gingham tablecloth salvaged by his mother’s Singer and gifted to him when he saved enough to put down first and last on a four-story walk-up on Bay Parkway.  

Early morning light filters through the gingham, reflecting a pale checkerboard on the sheets atop him. Bucky startles up and out of the secondhand Murphy bed, purchased a lifetime ago, and instinctively reaches for a gun that isn’t there, anticipates the _click click click_ of an arm no longer metal. His legs are back; he’s solid again.

 _What the hell?_  

He surveys the room, a room he couldn’t possibly be in: Murphy bed; plain sheets piled high on the side of the bed opposite him; lone nightstand-cum-dining table-cum-desk stacked with books from the library on 86th Street he used to visit after work; mismatched chairs; radio atop a lopsided chest of drawers; gas stove and ice box older than him; sink, complete with exposed plumbing that froze every winter; door to the bathroom ajar; and clothing askew on the floor, including a jacket he recognized over half a century later. Steve wore that damn trench day in and out for years until the elbows wore through for the third time and Bucky’d just bought him a new coat instead of repatching it again.

“What time is it?”

Bucky whirls around, startled first by the intrusion and then by the recognition of the voice. There, impossibly small and hidden in the pile of sheets, is Steve. Not serumed and uniformed, not bearded and bloody and fighting _fucking aliens_ in Wakanda. Just Steve; young and hair tousled and unmistakably hungover. He blinks stupidly at the light streaming through the curtains, as if unsure whether it’s dawn or dusk, “I need to check on mom.” Out of bed and dressing, then throwing on that ugly trench Bucky hadn’t realized he’d missed, Steve shoulders unceremoniously past Bucky for the door.

_What the fuck?_

A hallucination? The last few neurons firing off in his brain before he croaks? He must have been hit with one hell of a weapon; he didn’t even feel the blow. Maybe he’s already dead and this is what, heaven? No fucking way he made it to heaven after all he’s done. 

“Look, I was drunk last night, and you were pretty cut up about Ruth leaving with that Italian yuck.” Not heaven; hell it is, then. Decades later and Bucky can still recite Steve’s morning-after-regret speech by heart: _we were drunk and some doll just walked all over you and then we got more drunk and oops! we accidentally fucked. Now let’s forget this ever happened until it inevitably does again. Dodgers game this weekend, pal?_  

“Yeah, right.” How else can he respond? Back when these conversations were real and not some unfair product of brain death, Bucky had managed to say more - _Stevie, we gotta talk about this. If it’s gonna keep happening, we gotta figure this out. It can’t be so bad if we both keep coming back to each other._ But what’s the point? It didn’t work then, so it sure as hell won't make any difference now. Besides, the youth of his voice strikes and quiets him even if he had wanted to revisit his morning-after pleading; how could he ever have sounded so young, so God damn innocent?  

Steve’s already half out the door, avoiding eye contact, avoiding a conversation that Bucky eventually gave up trying to have. The not-yet-Cap is indeed going to check on his mom, but Bucky would bet decent money he’s stopping at confession on the way.

“We can’t.” Steve doesn’t finish the thought. There’s nothing to say that he hasn’t promised and broken many times over.

Bucky wants to kiss him, wants to take the punk’s little shoulders ( _Christ, he’s so small)_ and push him against the peeling paint of the door. Hedge him in so he can’t run off to confession or his mom’s bedside or to a stupid fucking war that would be the end of what little they had. He wants to tell him what he was trying to say only moments ago in the Wakandan forest, before he went and died and hallucinated this fucked up tableau of their wanting romance. _Steve - I love you. Don’t get yourself killed._

But Steve’s down the hall already.

* 

How long does it take to die anyway?

He paces the apartment and eventually dresses himself with clothes found in the chest of drawers. The clothes were a necessity; looking at himself naked in the bathroom mirror had ended in broken glass across the floor and a refreshingly painful bloody fist. His skin is jarringly unfamiliar. No rope-thick scars where Hydra attached the arm. No trailing, fainter scars where he tried to claw off the arm. A flesh left hand, human and warm and bleeding from mirror shards.

After bandaging his hand, he paces more and hopes this business of dying will hurry up. He can’t stay here. 

Fiddles with the radio.

Finds two ticket stubs from Coney Island on the dresser.

Opens the ice box out of some old, forgotten habit.

Runs the gingham through his flesh left hand.

Sits on the bed.

Smells Steve’s lingering aftershave, a scent he should have forgotten, but hasn’t.

_Fuck it._

* 

He remembers the way to Steve’s building. It’s muscle memory, like combat training or reloading a rifle; he couldn’t have given directions if asked, but his feet know the route without hesitation. Left at the deli, right at the corner with the crooked street lamp, cut through the park, a final right at the post office, and one flight up on the exterior back staircase. Steve’s unit is 202. 

He doesn’t knock, lest he disturb the figment of his dying imagination that is Steve’s mom. Instead he takes the key, hidden under the same brick for as long as Steve’s lived here, and opens the door.

 _Might as well enjoy this hallucination. Might as well make it count._  

Steve’s washing dishes, and he only just has time to look up and say, “Bucky?” before Bucky closes the distance between them and tilts Steve’s chin up to his. 

It’s a brief kiss; Steve breaks it, gazing at Bucky with some combination of apprehension and abandon. “My mom - ” he gestures to the bedroom.

“Sleeping?” Near the end, she was always sleeping. 

“Yeah, but we can’t. We can’t. We can’t.” Steve’s oft-repeated mantra, usually followed by Steve on his knees, mantra quieted only by a wanton _slurp slurp slurp_ or by a fumbling of buttons and fabric as Bucky palms them both together, Steve still soundlessly mouthing _we can’t_ as he grinds his hips against Bucky’s. The protests never last, replaced only with heavy breathing and a hushed _more_ and _please._

“Yes we can. Fuck, Steve, I need you.” Bucky has him against the wall now, mouth on his neck, desperate for one last time, no matter how imagined, how false. How long had it been? Two years since that frantic one-off in Siberia after the mess with Zemo and Stark? And before that? A lifetime. 

They’d never managed the timing; never found a place for the righteous Steve Rogers (first the good Catholic boy, then patriotic Captain America) to settle for his worthless ass (first the degenerate faggy kid, then Hydra’s dead-eyed assassin). God help him, Bucky knows he’s never deserved Steve, not then and certainly not now, but fuck, it doesn’t stop him from wanting. 

They spent their teens and better part of their twenties stealing drunken fucks in the night while chasing skirts during the day. Bucky was convincing, good with the dames even though he didn’t have much interest. His father had seen through it all, _don’t act like a sissy, James,_ he warned with a backhand more than once, especially when that Johnson boy two buildings over was beat so bad he couldn’t walk for a week after being spotted at that _fag bar_ in Brooklyn Heights. So he chased more skirts, set up double dates that more often than not ended in a polite peck on the cheek from Betty or Dorothy or Yvonne and a hasty handjob from Steve at his place or in some back alley, and tried to remind himself that whatever this was to him, it was something considerably less to Steve.  

Then the war, which at least had been a distraction until Steve showed up a foot taller and a hundred and fifty pounds heavier, but still _God damn Steve_ , and now instead of drunkenly messing around in his apartment it was bruised and bloody sex in pup tents or burned out dives. Then Hydra and the Soviets. Then Bucharest and the Accords and Siberia and Wakanda and the end of the world. They’d never managed it. They had more chances than most, but it never stuck. No matter how much Bucky wanted it, wanted anything more than quick fucks that were never mentioned again until the next quick fuck, he had never been enough. And how could he be, for someone like Steve? 

But now he’s dying and Steve’s probably dead too, or will be soon. So he pushes closer to Steve’s facsimile, the closest he’s been since Siberia, the closest he’ll ever be again.

And what a convincing copy he is. Steve’s kissing back, lightly biting Bucky’s lower lip in the exact same way he always did. Legs wrapped around Bucky’s waist, Steve’s pinned against the wall, fingers clawing at the nape of Bucky’s neck, struggling for purchase. 

Steve’s steely blue eyes, just as steadfast now as when he’s Captain fucking America, are somber as he pulls away. This isn’t how they do things; never during the day, almost never sober. “We can’t.” Another gesture to the bedroom. Another reason to add to his list. Even in death, even at the end of the world, even in his fantasies, Steve just can’t give in.

Steve’s disappointed, Bucky realizes. Disappointed that Bucky would come here and break their unstated agreement: we can only ever do this when there’s something to blame it on, some excuse for Steve to justify all this immorality. Alcohol, a bad date, Steve’s latest ass kicking; in the future it will be friends’ deaths and bad injuries and something they call PTSD now and the adrenaline that comes from nearly dying or watching each other nearly die at the hands of some Hydra asshole.

“Then let’s go back to my place. Let’s go anywhere.” _Please, just one last time._ But Steve is so far away. The floor is falling out from beneath him as the apartment itself evaporates around him. The air is thin. There’s nothing.

_‘til the end of the line, pal._

_*_

_*_

_*_

He’s conscious again, which is confusing.

Slumped uncomfortably against a hard wall, Bucky takes in his surroundings. Not Wakanda or Brooklyn; a small room devoid of furniture, concrete from floor to ceiling, windowless, no features except a lone door, heavily reinforced. A cell. 

Had the aliens won? And captured him? He must have just been unconscious, not dying. He shakes his head and tries to rid himself of the lingering feeling of Steve’s lips against his, the tingling so real for just a dream.

Reality sets in and he feels the walls for any weaknesses; none are apparent. The concrete is probably reinforced and likely feet thick given the complete silence around him. And if this is indeed alien tech, then all bets are off. He focuses on the door, his best shot as far as he can tell. Bucky slams his body into it, hard. It doesn’t budge or dent, but there’s a promising amount of give. Another slam and then another, and he manages to dent the metal exterior. On the eighth or ninth impact, pain flares hot and bright through his shoulder, which is when he notices his arm.

The new Wakandan vibranium limb is gone, replaced with -

_No no no no no no no no no no no._

Hydra’s arm, complete with the bullshit red star on the shoulder.

Bucky bashes himself into the door desperately, frantically, hits and punches the hinges with his left fist until he swears he can feel pain radiating out of the metal. He feels his pulse beat rapidly in his forehead, hears his staccato breathing as he pummels the door mindlessly, ignoring the pain. He needs out; he needs out right now. He can’t be here. He can’t be here. He can’t be here. When did he start crying? 

He’s breathless and exhausted, and the door is still standing. Dented to hell, but firm and unmoving.

_I need out. Please. Please. Please._

The door suddenly jerks open from the outside and Bucky’s ready. He’s going to destroy whatever stands between him and as far from here as he can get. Get out, regroup, figure out what the hell is going on.

Arm raised, poised to tackle, to knock out whatever goon Hydra sent. _Can’t go back to them, can’t do it again, just got free from them._

“Stand down, soldier.”

And there’s Steve, shield in hand, in full Hydra regalia.

**Author's Note:**

> Follow me on Tumblr - spunknbite.tumblr.com


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